Lili's advice for the day

It's a sign of the times that the shops are selling girdles and they seem to be popular, offered in a range of forms and colours. I hadn't seen one of those bloody horrible things since the 1970s, and I never thought I'd ever see one again. I thought girdles would forever belong to that long-ago age in which bras and girdles were known as "foundation garments". One thing that I will concede that the the new generation of "foundation garments" or "shapewear" have over the old style fat-wrangling heavy-duty buff-coloured underwear is that the new generation of corsetry seems to be more realistic in it's body coverage than the old style girdle, which was built to contain the arse only with separate flopper-stoppers for the breasts. It is indeed a good idea to wear one great big girdle that covers most of the torso (but I cannot imagine how one would squeeze into one of those things in under half an hour), because if you wear just a girdle pulled and tugged up around a large backside, in time the girdle will press and mould the bum into a bizarre and unnatural shape reminiscent of a spinning top. Once you have an arse in this peculiar shape you can forget swimming, unless they now make girdles that you can swim in (nothing would surprise me any more). It might be hard to believe that a naturally-occurring oversize butt with cellulite lumps that look like a blancmange that has been left out in a hailstorm could acquire an even more strange shape, but believe me, it's true. I've seen it with my own eyes, and what has been seen cannot be unseen. This is not the kind of nostalgia that I enjoy. Wouldn't it be simpler and smarter to watch what you eat and do a bit of exercise?